STEAM Accreditation for Edx Education 3D GEOSTIX® CONSTRUCTION SET

Characteristics of a ‘good toy’

The children really enjoyed creating the different shapes and found it easy to clip the pieces together. The children were engaged for prolonged periods of time as they built different things. Clipping them together and taking them apart.
The children returned to play with these a few times.
They are also tactile and the children enjoyed fiddling with them.

This toy was particularly beneficial in encouraging children to learn about 2D and 3D shapes, and creating different shapes from the same pieces. Playing with the GeoStix increases children’s understanding of geometric principles and enables
them to learn through trial and error, building their confidence.

Prime STEAM attributes

Children enjoyed constructing shapes representing real-world items – a house, animals etc. and the construction skills they develop during their engagement with the GeoStix are transferable to their daily life. They created their own constructions and enjoyed showing their constructions to friends and family. When the children experimented with different abstract shapes, they used vocabulary around artistic skills and expression and used trial and error learning to overcome challenges with fitting different pieces together to create more elaborate shapes. Once children mastered creating simple, 2D shapes, they quickly moved onto creating 3D shapes with increasing levels of complexity.

Specific STEM categories

Science (Matter)
● 7-9 years
○ Understanding how an object made of a small set of pieces can be disassembled and made into a new object, by constructing and deconstructing the rod structures.

Engineering (General Engineering)
● 4-6 years
○ Comparing the strengths and weaknesses of two objects, by experimenting with different rods and connector pads to build
structures.

Mathematics (Shapes and Measurements)
● 4-6 years
○ Identifying and describing basic 2D and 3D shapes (eg. squares, triangles, cubes, and cones) in different sizes and orientations.
○ Describing and comparing measurements, by talking about how big one structure is compared to another, experimenting to see if structures can be made bigger or smaller by adding or taking away rods.